Category: Community

Townsville floodways

Townsville is built on a floodplain. From a distance the whole city looks flat, with a few very obvious bumps: Mt Stuart and its foothills, Castle Hill and Mt Louisa. But the flat area is not quite flat.

Early settlers built on the (slightly) higher areas, avoiding the mudflats and mangroves, and formed their roads on the (low) ridges, leaving the (shallow) gullies and creeks alone. Over the 150 years since, low spots have been built up, and watercourses deepened and straightened, as urbanisation encroached on the lower ground. But the natural drainage network persists, as we realise (often unhappily) whenever we get a lot of rain.

An overview
Map of Townsville watercourses
Townsville watercourses, Castle Hill to Mundingburra

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Townsville’s 1925 floods

Someone shared a Townsville flood photo on social media a few days ago and I saved it for potential recycling. Then the rain started and everyone shared a flood photo on social media.

This is now more topical than it was when I saved it.

historic photo of flooded city
Ross Creek, looking upstream

I have just spent a few minutes on gooooglemaps to produce a 3D rendering from approximately the same location, somewhere up on Melton Terrace or Willmett St.

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Resilience

We’ve just had our first real wet-season rain, foreshadowing the approaching cyclone season. It’s a reminder that our weather is getting less predictable and more dangerous to ourselves and our cities.

We can’t do much about that, although we should still do what we can, but at least we can cultivate a more resilient lifestyle. This is not about going into full ‘prepper’ mode, with a bunker in the back yard and a tinfoil hat, but about making minor and generally painless adjustments to how we go about our daily lives.

Some of them look quite old-fashioned but there’s a reason for that.

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Getting top value from rooftop solar

A social media post from Ergon, our (only) local electricity retailer, caught my eye a couple of days ago:

Ergon: Sun’s out? Turn it on! That’s what we call ‘solar soaking’. Dishwashers, washing machines and clothes dryers can have built in timers that let you control when they come on. Set them to run when the sun is out to get the most value from your solar system. To find out more go to www.ergon.com.au/solarsoak.

It attracted a few comments and I joined in.

Ann: If you were lucky enough to get the 44c you are supposed to use it all at night after 8pm to get the most benefit back from input into the grid or so we were told.

Malcolm: True – but only if you’re still on the 44c feed-in tariff. Not many people are, these days.

To expand on that:
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